Broken WordPress PageNavi

So, my company has an interesting take on support. Unlike those other guys, who we won’t name out of politeness, when you contact us for support, you get people who know what the hell they’re doing. Or if they don’t, in the case of third-party software that isn’t part of our core business strategy – like WordPress – we can fake it.

Had a client with a WordPress blog, using PageNavi. It suddenly broke, badly – pagination worked for specific categories, but not for the main feed (eg, index/landing page which shows all posts), or for the archives. It started off with late pages (in the 18+ range) returning page not found errors, and progressed to the point where the second page started showing the same.

Searching for info on PageNavi is like herding cats – Google will give you nothing of use, but page after page of results insisting that you just have to use PageNavi. So, this is why I get the big cheezburgrz:

The solution ended up being simple. Under the ‘Reading’ settings, the ‘Blog pages show at most’ setting was set to a ridiculously high number. Despite this, the individual pages weren’t showing more than maybe 5 posts at a time. Reduced the number to 5, and suddenly, pagination via PageNavi worked up to the final page.